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A fight with a Dell (Warning: This is LONG)
So, I'm pretty sure this fits here, but if not, the mods can tell me where to move it to. This isn’t so much a request for help as it is a story of my hubris. I will have a TL; DR at the end, and a maybe not so surprising twist.
I'm a gamer. I love playing most video games, from ancient Atari classics to AAA blockbusters like AC and the likes. My wife is also a gamer, but is more into things like WOW and MK. We wanted to teach the kids how to play WOW and other coop games, rather than just the deathmatches in Halo and COD.
The problem started with my poor dell laptop, it’s a 5-year-old AMD A6 Inspiron with 8gigs of ram and an anemic graphics chip. It originally came loaded with Windows 8 but was shortly upgraded to Win10. Both were more than this poor machine could handle. So, I thought I could toss Linux Mint on there and still get some use out of it, and it worked fine for low power games like portal and half-life.
Then the boys got here, and I got the bright idea of teaching them WOW as something we could do as a family. I know that it is technically possible to play WOW on Linux, with some tweaking and the proper WINE/Lutris combination. I read several articles, watched 5 YouTube videos on how to config it, and basically followed the bouncing ball on how to do it. 7 hours later I am frothing at the mouth and seething with rage as this POS refuses to run the game.
I realize that I’m not a Linux guru and have only dabbled with it both professionally and as a tinkerer, but this thing made me feel like a Luser. I have no problems running cli updates and installs, I really like apt-get, and Mint is one of the most forgiving distros I have played with. But I was defeated.
I decided to try Win10 on it again, but something about 10 made the mouse movements choppy and very laggy. Very similar to Win95 during a defrag. Add to that, the base Win10 install image I had didn’t have the drivers for all the hardware on this middle of the road Dell. I spent many hours tweaking and reinstalling different things to try and get it playing the game. All for naught, we got a pitiful 12FPS and the Wi-Fi was sketchy. Again, I was defeated.
So, I decided to do something drastic, something most tech savvy folk on this board would shiver to do. I installed windows 8.1. My thought process was a little bit “It came with 8 installed, maybe it was tuned for it”, and a little bit “I’m gonna watch this f&^%$&^ burn”. I still fell dirty for downloading it (via MSDN with a clean license, same with Win10), but I was desperate. Again, I had to comb the Dell support site for the drivers and had to pummel it into submission to install the game. The default drivers from Dell kinda worked, but the game wasn’t happy with them. And the newest drivers caused a similar lag with the mouse as Win10. I was getting pretty pissed at this, and pretty pissed because of the Jameson I consumed to kill the shame…..
Then I saw something, on the Dell support page under supported OS, they had drivers for both 32 and 64-bit Win7! I know that its on its last support legs, and some folks will tell you that its not secure, but its temporary. I pulled out my physical copy of Win7 ultimate that I bought just after it launched (got a sweet deal on the system builder version on TigerDirect!) and fired it up. 10 hours of install and updates later, it worked (kinda). The touch pad driver refused to install, and I had to use 3 revisions back to get it to install, and then had to put all the Dell bloatware on it to turn it off just to be able to type on the keyboard without my fat hands pulling the mouse pointer across the screen.
Once all that pain was complete, we fired up WOW, and it was bad. 15FPS in town, maybe 22 in the wild. I felt horrible making the kid play the game on this thing. He on the other hand was having a blast. He and his brother are making me crazy with HOW they play the game, but they are enjoying it. I tried to play on it and it physically hurt to do.
And now the not so surprising twist, Dell has a decent Father’s day sale that I decided to get a new beefier machine. I will relegate the old Dell back to Linux Mint and use it for tinkering. I know what a lot of you are going to say, “You should have just got the new one in the first place”, but I thought I was L337, funny that.
TL; DR: I fought with a POS Dell for 4 days and it still ran like a POS Dell. Bought a new shiny Dell to play WOW on.
I'm a gamer. I love playing most video games, from ancient Atari classics to AAA blockbusters like AC and the likes. My wife is also a gamer, but is more into things like WOW and MK. We wanted to teach the kids how to play WOW and other coop games, rather than just the deathmatches in Halo and COD.
The problem started with my poor dell laptop, it’s a 5-year-old AMD A6 Inspiron with 8gigs of ram and an anemic graphics chip. It originally came loaded with Windows 8 but was shortly upgraded to Win10. Both were more than this poor machine could handle. So, I thought I could toss Linux Mint on there and still get some use out of it, and it worked fine for low power games like portal and half-life.
Then the boys got here, and I got the bright idea of teaching them WOW as something we could do as a family. I know that it is technically possible to play WOW on Linux, with some tweaking and the proper WINE/Lutris combination. I read several articles, watched 5 YouTube videos on how to config it, and basically followed the bouncing ball on how to do it. 7 hours later I am frothing at the mouth and seething with rage as this POS refuses to run the game.
I realize that I’m not a Linux guru and have only dabbled with it both professionally and as a tinkerer, but this thing made me feel like a Luser. I have no problems running cli updates and installs, I really like apt-get, and Mint is one of the most forgiving distros I have played with. But I was defeated.
I decided to try Win10 on it again, but something about 10 made the mouse movements choppy and very laggy. Very similar to Win95 during a defrag. Add to that, the base Win10 install image I had didn’t have the drivers for all the hardware on this middle of the road Dell. I spent many hours tweaking and reinstalling different things to try and get it playing the game. All for naught, we got a pitiful 12FPS and the Wi-Fi was sketchy. Again, I was defeated.
So, I decided to do something drastic, something most tech savvy folk on this board would shiver to do. I installed windows 8.1. My thought process was a little bit “It came with 8 installed, maybe it was tuned for it”, and a little bit “I’m gonna watch this f&^%$&^ burn”. I still fell dirty for downloading it (via MSDN with a clean license, same with Win10), but I was desperate. Again, I had to comb the Dell support site for the drivers and had to pummel it into submission to install the game. The default drivers from Dell kinda worked, but the game wasn’t happy with them. And the newest drivers caused a similar lag with the mouse as Win10. I was getting pretty pissed at this, and pretty pissed because of the Jameson I consumed to kill the shame…..
Then I saw something, on the Dell support page under supported OS, they had drivers for both 32 and 64-bit Win7! I know that its on its last support legs, and some folks will tell you that its not secure, but its temporary. I pulled out my physical copy of Win7 ultimate that I bought just after it launched (got a sweet deal on the system builder version on TigerDirect!) and fired it up. 10 hours of install and updates later, it worked (kinda). The touch pad driver refused to install, and I had to use 3 revisions back to get it to install, and then had to put all the Dell bloatware on it to turn it off just to be able to type on the keyboard without my fat hands pulling the mouse pointer across the screen.
Once all that pain was complete, we fired up WOW, and it was bad. 15FPS in town, maybe 22 in the wild. I felt horrible making the kid play the game on this thing. He on the other hand was having a blast. He and his brother are making me crazy with HOW they play the game, but they are enjoying it. I tried to play on it and it physically hurt to do.
And now the not so surprising twist, Dell has a decent Father’s day sale that I decided to get a new beefier machine. I will relegate the old Dell back to Linux Mint and use it for tinkering. I know what a lot of you are going to say, “You should have just got the new one in the first place”, but I thought I was L337, funny that.
TL; DR: I fought with a POS Dell for 4 days and it still ran like a POS Dell. Bought a new shiny Dell to play WOW on.
I AM the evil bastard!
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